A downward look
Opening lines of the present passage in the new edition of Savitri run as follows:

Then suddenly there came a downward look.
As if a sea exploring its own depths,
A living Oneness widened at its core
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes.

Here the comparison of the second line is with the living Oneness widening at its core, widening at its core in the manner of a sea exploring its own depths. In the process, that widening would join him to unnumbered multitudes. But if we should at all combine both the actions, of widening at its core and joining him to unnumbered multitudes, then these would be happening together in the manner of the sea’s exploring its own depths. We could have, effectively,

A living Oneness widened at its core
As if a sea exploring its own depths,
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes.

Or else

A living Oneness widened at its core
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes,
As if a sea exploring its own depths.

None of these are natural and felicitous; the metaphors don’t coalesce. The actions connected with ‘widening’ and joining’ do not go well with the action of ‘exploration of depths’. They look incongruous.

In the earlier editions we had:

Then suddenly there came a downward look
As if a sea exploring its own depths;
A living Oneness widened at its core
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes.

A downward look exploring sea-like its own depths is certainly acceptable, the plunge of the look deepening into depths is in harmony with the contents it is speaking of. There is the sense of unity and accord.

But how has this change in punctuation taken place? The information pertaining to this passage is as follows:

Sri Aurobindo’s last-but-one manuscript has

Then suddenly there came a downward look.
As if a sea exploring its own depths, …

In the final manuscript we have the same but without any punctuation:

Then suddenly there came a downward look
As if a sea exploring its own depths …

The revised scribal copy, which continues without any further revision, reads as follows:

Then suddenly there came a downward look
As if a sea exploring its own depths; …

We are also told in the Supplement to the Revised Edition of Savitri that it “is not certain that this punctuation was put at Sri Aurobindo’s dictation.”

If there is such an uncertainty, then the obvious line of approach should have been to retain what is there in the revised scribal copy rather than go by the penultimate draft. After all, it is this version which was read out to Sri Aurobindo, subsequently, on a number of occasions. At the most, and as a matter of editorial thoroughness and care, perhaps also as a matter of curiosity, the suggested alternative punctuation should have been put as a footnote. We are going, as elsewhere, essentially by the centenary edition of Savitri.

RYD

Om Chidrūpiņī Paramā
Aswapati, whose birth held a symbol and a sign for us, was concerned with the issue of mortality in this creation. He came, and did intense yajna-tapasya here, and in its splendid-golden fire carried the world’s desire to the Supreme. The long spiritual quest was undertaken with the intention of resolving the mortality’s issue in a divine way. He had the inborn conviction that, thus alone could there be genuine progress here, evolutionary progress from light to more light, the higher powers of the spirit entering into it. In his hard sustained and difficult climbing of the world stairs, world above wonderful world, he has presently arrived at the top of the cosmic manifestation. He is in possession of the greater knowledge, the supramental in its transcendental dynamism which must take charge of the soul of the earth.

Now, as a decisive yogic step, Aswapati has entered the impenetrable luminous blank in which even the world’s yearning he was carrying with him disappeared. What he sees in that luminous blank, the brilliant Void, is a potent universe without galaxies, without streams, mountains, beasts or birds or men, withheld in its utter formlessness that which can manifest, the epiphanic. Behind Sachchidānanda stood the quiescent and what remained was nothing but the Nirvana of the Absolute, the austere apocalyptic alone, Nirvana beyond Nirvana. The cosmic and even the transcendental have disappeared from sight. Yet he must know that one power whose enigma gives meaning and contents to all these thousand things, manifest and unmanifest, phenomenal and eternal. In the process, everything was abolished, and there stood only the forceful positive, the fire that gives fire to these countless fires. In it his spirit’s will pursued the unknowable.

In such a tremendous experience, Aswapati sees that immortal death worked all along with the heart of love, and that ignorance was a bright page in the book entitled Om Chidrūpiņī Paramā, her name, the supreme embodied as the executive Consciousness-Force. There the sons of divinity hymned her glories, and offered to her onyxes and diamonds, and came epic conquests of nobility, and real-ideas of distinction to make these worlds their aspects

But, first in that bright sacrifice, Aswapati must offer to the great divine the entire occult past of the earth, offer it as an oblation of the sacrifice, āhutī, the past that yet persisted to live, the past including that of Nature and of the Gods. Here was the beginningless beginning, and here was the endless end, here was the unmoved mover. Here flamed his will in trance of luminous sleep, and here was formed the world-celebrating truth, immortal even in things material.

In it a new creation was born, in the House of the Spirit. He brought it out in it, established it in it. It is this new creation that must be brought down here, upon the mortal earth. In it is the fulfilment of the world’s desire. Aswapati’s task becomes now well-focused. He knows that it is Chidrūpiņī Paramā, the divine Consciousness-Force who alone can do it, and that she must take the mortal birth.

RYD

In a thunder-flash of God
The gains of the world are, fortunately, not all that insignificant and we can derive a good deal of comfort from our daily occupations and activities, feel relief from the feeling of frustration that invades us quite often. But, perhaps, only the complaint is that these gains and gifts are too little to satisfy the spirit’s deeper thirst. It looks, it is that desirable uneasiness in us which prods us on the fulfilling quest, always urging us to make progress. We remain discontented till life’s meaning and purpose are discovered, till we live in what they bring to us. The quest is therefore happily there, inherently there, and we cannot just rest till the discovery is made. In its absence our greatest actions would remain dull, obtuse, uninteresting.

However, if this quest, and this discovery, were to lead us only to the pure Self, it would remain incomplete, compromised. In such a discovery name and form and attributes and qualities, and all the workings of the mind would cease to exist, with the appalling danger of giving the impression of this phenomenal world to be nothing but a bad dream, an illusion. When the self is won, more often than not the world is lost; vastness and space, time and eternity get cut off from each other—as if they are fundamentally incompatible with each other, antagonistic to each other.

The path, in that case, would be the Path of Escape; but “Escape brings not the victory and the crown!” The negative is asserted forcefully, but then it turns out that, in this creation, the possibility of the positive gets denied with equal vehemence. Aswapati is alert and swift in recognising the situation and arrives at the realisation that there is a greater and truer, the truest Truth “at the mystic fount of Life”, that the first entrance into the timelessness cannot, in fact need not be the dismissal of all that is in time. Aswapati’s pursuit of the Unknowable reveals to him the true mystery behind all this:

Across the silence of the ultimate Calm
The Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close.

In a “thunder-flash of God” he sees that that Presence must be brought down into the “darkness of the suffering world”, that it is she who would heal its wound and suffering, heal it with her love and truth and joy. That is the only way, and there is none other, nānyastha panthah. In it the riddle of the world got dissolved and a “Life from beyond grew conqueror here of Death.” The dichotomy between the hesitant ‘yes’ and the stubborn ‘no’ has at once vanished and the unity of knowledge embraced every aspect of the creation.

There was no cleavage between soul and soul
There was no barrier between world and God.

Not only that; Aswapati’s ascent is beyond the world awaiting the Descent the world to save. He even steps into regions “past not-self and self and selflessness”. There, in that supreme Nirvanic state, in that infinity, he awaits the ultimate voice of the utter Transcendence. And what does he hear, and see?

The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul,
To feel was a flame-discovery of God,
All mind was a single harp of many strings,
All life a song of many meeting lives;
For worlds were many, but the Self was one.

This knowledge was now made a cosmos' seed:
This seed was cased in the safety of the Light,
It needed not a sheath of Ignorance.

Then from the trance of that tremendous clasp
And from the throbbings of that single Heart
And from the naked Spirit's victory
A new and marvellous creation rose.

His knowledge of things and the unity of all the cosmic aspects now became the seed from which a new world could spring up. In fact it has become the seed, but cased in the safety of the Light.

This is the great things Aswapati has already done, the measureless siddhi achieved, achieved in the Transcendent, in the House of the Spirit, forming the seed but encased in the safety of the Light. That seed must now sprout in the dim earthly soil. Presently this is Aswapat’s one concern.

RYD

Past not-self and self and selflessness—the Unknowable
We have in the Gita a significant term brahma-nirvāņa which, as Sri Aurobindo explains in the Essays, is the extinction in the Brahman, the Vedantic loss of a partial in a perfect being. This state is different from that of supreme peace of a calm self-extinction, śāntim nirvāņa-paramām, which is not the Buddhist's Nirvana in a blissful negation of being. Generally, in these connotations, Nirvana is taken in the sense of total non-attachment and extinction of the ego. It is a state of inner deeper happiness, of peace, the peace of an absolute inactive cessation. “Sages win Nirvana in the Brahman,” says the Scripture; everything is blown out in it, everything transient and sorrowful. It further says: Brahman-knower is he who has risen into the Brahman-consciousness, brahmavid brahmaņi sthitāh. One who has the deeper inner happiness and the deeper inner ease and repose and the intense inner light, that Yogin becomes the Brahman and reaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahma-nirvāņam.

The experience of Aswapati in Savitri’s Pursuit of the Unknowable is altogether of a different order of Nirvana, a singular, exceptional experience of the positive kind, that from which can ensue new possibilities. But first let us see what Nirvana is. We may just read the following from Sri Aurobindo: (Letters on Yoga, pp. 46-7)

In orthodox Buddhism it does mean a disintegration, not of the soul—for that does not exist—but of a mental compound or stream of associations or samskāras which we mistake for our self. In illusionist Vedanta it means, not a disintegration but a disappearance of a false and unreal individual self into the one real Self or Brahman; it is the idea and experience of individuality that so disappears and ceases,—we may say a false light that is extinguished (nirvāņa) in the true Light. In spiritual experience it is sometimes the loss of all sense of individuality in a boundless cosmic consciousness; what was the individual remains only as a centre or a channel for the flow of a cosmic consciousness and a cosmic force and action. Or it may be the experience of the loss of individuality in a transcendent being and consciousness in which the sense of cosmos as well as the individual disappears. Or again, it may be in a transcendence which is aware of and supports the cosmic action. But what do we mean by the individual? What we usually call by that name is a natural ego, a device of Nature which holds together her action in the mind and body. This ego has to be extinguished, otherwise there is no complete liberation possible; but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal portion of the Divine, but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting his manifestation as the Many. This is the true spiritual individual which appears in its complete truth when we get rid of the ego and our false separative sense of individuality, realise our oneness with the transcendent and cosmic Divine and with all beings. It is this which makes possible the Divine Life. Nirvana is a step towards it; the disappearance of the false separative individuality is a necessary condition for our realising and living in our true eternal being, living divinely in the Divine.

About himself, Sri Aurobindo writes (pp. 49-50):

Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world—only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. This was no mental realisation nor something glimpsed somewhere above,—no abstraction,—it was positive, the only positive reality,—although not a spatial physical world, pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this semblance of a physical world, leaving no room or space for any reality but itself, allowing nothing else to seem at all actual, positive or substantial. I cannot say there was anything exhilarating or rapturous in the experience, as it then came to me,—(the ineffable Ananda I had years afterwards),—but what it brought was an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom. I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all, and the inner heart of experience, a constant memory of it and its power to return remained until in the end it began to disappear into a greater Superconsciousness from above. But meanwhile realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion (footnote: In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence) is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always, with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine.

This is something beyond the Buddhist Nirvana and the Adwaitin's Moksha which are, actually, the same thing. “It corresponds to a realisation in which one does not feel oneself any longer as an individual with such a name or such a form, but an infinite eternal Self spaceless (even when in space), timeless (even when in time).” (p. 62)

Shankara wanted to dismiss the world as an illusion and attain Moksha, Liberation. Buddha would have stepped into Nirvana but, as Amitabha, he refused to do so, Amitabha who is without bound, who is infinite, is full of light and splendour. Through his effort, he created the Pure Land (Japanese: jìngtŭ) or Sukhāvatī, possessing blissfulness. By his intense tapasya, by his forty-eight vows, it has become possible for the follower of the path to be reborn into this land of happiness. Amitabha's body is golden-hued, hiraņya-varņa, his light is the light beyond mind, his brows illumine a hundred worlds, his eyes are oceans without limit, without shores.

What does he assure us? Nirvana, cessation from the cycles of birth and death, from this Samsara full of pain and suffering. But escape brings not the crown.

Sakyamuni, the Buddha of the present Age, tells us that in the past Dharmakar accepted the misery and suffering of the living creature and, by the power of his compassion, established the Pure and Perfect Land. There would dwell the liberated.

But there is something more than that, something absolutely marvellous. In the evening on 20 December1916, after her meditation at 5.30, the Mother receives a communication from Sakyamuni:

As thou art contemplating me, I shall speak to thee this evening. I see in thy heart a diamond surrounded by a golden light. It is at once pure and warm, something which may manifest impersonal love; but why dost thou keep this treasure enclosed in that dark casket lined with deep purple? The outermost covering is of a deep lustreless blue, a real mantle of darkness. It would seem that thou art afraid of showing thy splendour. Learn to radiate and do not fear the storm: the wind carries us far from the shore but shows us over the world. Wouldst thou be thrifty of thy tenderness? But the source of love is infinite. Dost thou fear to be misunderstood? But where hast thou seen man capable of understanding the Divine? And if the eternal truth finds in thee a means of manifesting itself, what dost thou care for all the rest? Thou art like a pilgrim coming out of the sanctuary; standing on the threshold in front of the crowd, he hesitates before revealing his precious secret, that of his supreme discovery. Listen, I too hesitated for days, for I could foresee both my preaching and its results: the imperfection of expression and the still greater imperfection of understanding. And yet I turned to the earth and men and brought them my message. Turn to the earth and men—isn’t this the command thou always hearest in thy heart?—in thy heart, for it is that which carries a blessed message for those who are athirst for compassion. Henceforth nothing can attack the diamond. It is unassailable in its perfect constitution and the soft radiance that flashes from it can change many things in the hearts of men. Thou doubtest thy power and fearest thy ignorance? It is precisely this that wraps up thy strength in that dark mantle of starless night. Thou hesitatest and tremblest as on the threshold of a mystery, for now the mystery of the manifestation seems to thee more terrible and unfathomable than that of the Eternal Cause. But thou must take courage again and obey the injunction from the depths. It is I who am telling thee this, for I know thee and love thee as thou didst know and love me once. I have appeared clearly before thy sight so that thou mayst in no way doubt my word. And also to thy eyes I have shown thy heart so that thou canst thus see what the supreme Truth has willed for it, so that thou mayst discover in it the law of thy being. The thing still seems to thee quite difficult: a day will come when thou wilt wonder how for so long it could have been otherwise.

How wonderful, the source of love is infinite! “If the eternal truth finds in thee a means of manifesting itself, what dost thou care for all the rest?” The Eternal as the divine Incarnate has willed it and it must be executed. “The mystery of the manifestation seems to thee more terrible and unfathomable than that of the Eternal Cause.” Aswapati goes to the Eternal Cause and unravels the Mystery of the Creation. Tapping that Eternal Cause he has established the New Creation in the Transcendent.

What could we see in these revelations? The following: In spiritual experience it is the loss of all sense of individuality in a cosmic consciousness, or the experience of the loss of individuality in a transcendent being and consciousness, or a transcendence which is aware of and supports the cosmic action. The possibility of the Divine Life, towards which Nirvana is a step, opens out. There is only the positive reality and that is all that matters. That positive reality has been brought out from the Eternal Cause.

The greatness of Aswapati’s pursuing the utter Unknowable is to go beyond all cosmic manifestation, go beyond even the transcendental manifestation, the Manifestation of the Spirit from which in the cosmic deployment arise its own opposites, opposites that too are like itself infinite and powerful, go beyond Sachchidananda, the originator of this vast manifestation. It is thus alone, going beyond Sachchidananda, could the grim opposites be disburdened, removed, dissolved. When that is done, from the knowledge of the Eternal Cause is formed the Seed of Light, the possibility of the New Creation created. That is Aswapati’s Siddhi.

RYD

thank you for posting clear passages from Sri Aurobindo's literature. It was rather a beautiful posting. Intense flood of divine knowleldge!

Thanks, sincerely.

RYD

Silent, upon a peak in Darien—this new marvellous creation in topaz radiance
Keats’s sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1817) is a high mark in Romantic poetry. It is a Petrarchan sonnet divided into an octave and a sestet. In the octave, the poet has travelled in the realms of gold, and one of them is the great property of Homer, a vast tract of living and vibrant land, the seer-poet holding the lordship in the company of the heroic gods and goddesses. Here is the gold of many and many-sided splendours, born from the womb of the celestial Muse herself. After the beautiful prolegomena, the sonnet undergoes a volta at the sestet, coming to the new wonder the poet has discovered. It looks as though, the poet is dumbfound at what he saw in Chapman and the best way to acknowledge it is, to use another extended metaphor—the metaphor of Cortez staring, with eagle-eyes, at the inconceivable Pacific. All that can be described is by the utter silence alone, even as would the intensest speech fail to rise to the occasion. The awe experienced by Keats has come out most powerfully in the last line, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” We might argue that Keats was mentioning in his immortal creation a wrong conquistador,—it was actually Balboa, not Cortez, whose soldiers were the first Europeans to look upon the Pacific Ocean from a mountain in Panama—but nothing can take away or mar the perfection that walks here in celestial elegance and majesty, beautifully truthful as much as truthfully beautiful:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

But the important point for our purpose is, Cortez and his soldiers saw what already existed; it was not a new peak that came into sudden view in the manner of a new planet swimming past in the deep night sky.

The point is, we should see the Savitri-line “A new and marvellous creation rose” not as something unknown becoming known, but something that never existed and coming out, brought out of the utter Unknowable, an unexpressed possibility that is present in it, the sheer nonmanifest wheedled, persuaded to manifest it. This has been done by the intensification of a supreme will that alone can give definiteness and form to what was potential. The Upanishadic Veil of Unrevelation drawn over the Potential has by the yoga-tapasya of Aswapati got removed; nay, more than that. By the force of yoga-tapasya it has been formed. His knowledge created the seed of light. Thus was the new world first born in the Transcendent. That is Aswapati’s Trailokya rather Saptalokya Siddhi. The Mother will later announce that, in the wake of the supramental descent on 29 February 1956, a new world was born, born, born in the earth’s subtle-physical.

The Unknowable is undoubtedly far richer and vaster than the Unknown, with all that is creatively patent in it. The Unknown can become known, but it is not possible to know the Unknowable,—precisely for the reason that it holds in itself all the concealed possibilities, the possibilities that have not yet been thrown into manifestation. The Unknown is a part of the Manifest whereas the Unknowable is the Unmanifest or the Non-manifest with all creative urges, all potentialities and prospects, all positives from which can stream out countless manifestations. It is actually with this connotation that we should see Yogi Aswapati’s pursuing the Unknowable,—to bring out a new creation from the Unmanifest.

If it is a new creation upon the earth which Aswapati is proposing then, for that possibility to get established here, it should first be present in the Transcendent. His yogic effort is therefore first directed towards creating it there. He has set for himself a great task no doubt; but then it is only by fulfilling that great task can the full meaning and scope of its getting realised be certain. In it alone is the chance of achieving success. Aswapati is standing at the entrance of the Sanctum Sanctorum and there is the Upanishadic Veil of Unrevelation drawn over his vision. Behind that Veil everything seems to collapse, not only the nescient worlds but also the higher teeming worlds,—and the Spirit too.

Aswapati was standing on the verge of the Unknowable, free from the bondage of ignorance as well as of knowledge. All that was there with him until this moment was left behind,—except the single yearning that had taken him to that edge of creation. In such total freedom, he has the gleaming intuition of the future about his daughter Savitri’s marriage with Satyavan and his death in the Shalwa woods at the noontime. In it is present the entire problem of mortality for which he had undertaken this long and difficult journey across all these occult and spiritual worlds.

It is then that he suddenly sees the meaning of the ignorant “No.” It has been the primordial “No”, ur-No, at the origin of things. In this world that “No” has been the cause of failure; it had been, again and again, rejecting the gifts and the happy graces showered by the plenteous heaven in heavenly richness and munificence. There is a darkness surrounding the aspiring soul of humanity and in the lucre of sleep are trapped its dreams. The great Athenian always is concerned about great issues, and in the face of this tremendous “No” he has to make his last choice. Perhaps in it will be the victory of the blue-eyed Goddess of Wisdom, of Athena, the Divine Mother herself in the Transcendent.

The ignorant “No” may not be directly in Aswapati, but he ought to recognise its implacable or awesome presence in the world where he proposes the transforming Power to descend. Not only that. His long “apprenticeship to Ignorance” cannot terminate until and unless everything is done to the last detail, every nook and corner searched with the spirit’s fire, every contingency is properly taken care of. The Colonist from Immortality has willingly accepted the travail and he must suffer to the extremest degree of the arduous demand.

But it is not that Aswapati has newly discovered this creation. It is not that, because of the remarkable spiritual attainments of his, some pre-existent world,—which was already there,—has presently come into view. It is not a distant peak upon Darien suddenly caught by a keen eye of the voyager. It is a creation in relation to the earth, a creation that itself has arisen as a result of the intense tapasya of Aswapati. The Unknowable has offered him this wonderful gift in recognition of his tireless selfless effort, effort put in the Divine Cause. The Unknowable’s will took shape in his will. It looks as though the potent will of the Unknowable has to be activated by the will in the creation through intense Tapas, in the World by performing the Yajna invoking the Lord of Sacrifice. That indeed could be the true meaning of the Vedic spiritual approach which has presently been integrated in the possibility of a wider collectivity. That is also perhaps what is finally intended by the Gita's recommendation of works for the welfare of the people, lokasamgraha. Aswapati however makes it now realisable in the evolutionary context.

This new marvellous creation breathing in topaz radiance has many worlds, the worlds of beauty, of love, joy, thought, will, knowledge, power, light, form, reality’s substance, all with a perfection of God-state everywhere. But their materialisation upon the earth must await the “veiled Transcendent’s ultimate decree”. In the House of the Spirit this new creation is ready, poised for precipitation if the conditions here do become appropriate and receptive.

RYD

This materialisation of the new —The Divine Event
The Puraņas tell us that Brahma created the worlds by the Tapas-Will, by the power of concentrated gathering in of consciousness. In the present instance, Aswapati created the new world by the power of his yogic samkalpa, as an act of supreme will. He had the knowledge, of the Eternal and the Eternal in Time, and he was carrying with him the world’s desire. There was the problem of the two negations pulling the soul of man in opposite directions, the rejection of the world by the exclusive God-seeker and the denial of the materialist dismissing the things of the spirit—the Cartesian dichotomy of Spirit and Matter showing itself in various ways at various places. More fundamentally, at the base of the cosmic existence, there is the deep-seated antagonism to all that is high and noble and spiritually elevating, fulfilling, pitched against life the extreme ill-will and hostility of death. Contradictions have somehow entered into this creation and they have to be met and dealt with, removed, contradictions between falsehood and truth, evil and good, suffering and happiness, darkness and light. The ancient prayer is, to lead the aspirant-seeker from non-existence to existence, from darkness to light, from death to immortality. This is fine, but the world left behind continues to be governed by falsehood and ignorance and death. Aswapati accepts it not.

Now, again, in the context of the new world, there is a serious problem and, forthwith, it must be faced; it is that alone, the new creation, which can give meaning to his coming as the Supreme’s protagonist. Aswapati has created the new world in the House of the Spirit, but it will have significance and sense only in the eventuality of its materialisation taking place upon earth. However, this just cannot happen in the horror and severity, in the grimness of the present circumstance, in the narrow bottle of existence filled with darkness. If this Divine Event has to occur, this materialisation of the new world,—and it must, if this creation has behind it an intrinsic purpose and merit,—then the huge foreboding mind of Night sitting across its path must be removed. And who can do that, if not the Divine himself, the Divine as the incarnate Power? Aswapati’s realism, his understanding of the nature of things and processes, the pragmatics of the process, leads him to discover the solution. The solution lies in the Power of Manifestation to carry it through. He wills, she executes—that is the formula. She must come; no, she must be solicited to come. This can happen only in the Yajna of Sacrifice of the Purusha—and that is what the ancient Aswapati does. He performs the Savitri Yajna for eighteen years. Nothing is achieved without Yajna.

In the World-Soul Aswapati met her first as the cosmic power:

A silent soul of all the world was there;
A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,
A single Person who was himself and all…
Its power was to reveal divinity.
Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,
It bore within itself a seed, a flame,
A seed from which the Eternal is new-born
A flame that cancels death in mortal things.

Its power was to reveal divinity; it bore within itself a seed from which the Eternal is new-born, and it bore a flame that purifies everything, the golden flame of the Mystic Fire, Agni Pavaka, that consumes in its leaping tongues death lodged in mortal things. In that knowledge-and-action, daivī krīyā-samkalpa, has been brought out the new creation, the creation for the dwelling of the divine multitude, dīvyam janam, as the Veda says.

Such was the possibility seen by Aswapati in his downward look, a look like the gaze of the sea exploring its own depths. In it the Upper Ocean looks at its own realisable idea-image, the real-idea, in the Lower Ocean, the upper Waters pouring themselves into the lower now ready to receive them:

Then suddenly there came a downward look
As if a sea exploring its own depths;
A living Oneness widened at its core
And joined him to unnumbered multitudes.

Everywhere he sees oneness, the extension of god in all the ten directions. If so, there cannot arise in him the doubt of the World of God getting established upon earth, earth the base of the mortal creation, this mŗtyuloka. His experience of unitary consciousness is:

Existence found its truth on Oneness’ breast
And each became the self and space of all.

The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul.

…worlds were many, but the Self was one.

Incalculable outflowing infinitudes
Laughing out an unmeasured happiness
Lived their innumerable unity.

Rapture of beatific energies
Joined Time to the Timeless, poles of a single joy.

All by spiritual links were joined to all
And bound indissolubly to the One:
Each was unique but took all lives as its own,
And, following out these tones of the Infinite,
Recognised in himself the universe.

It took up tirelessly into its scope
Persons and figures of the Impersonal,
As if prolonging in a celestial count,
In a rapturous multiplication’s sum,
The recurring decimals of eternity.

None was apart, none lived for himself alone,
Each lived for God in him and God in all,

There Oneness was not tied to monotone;
It showed a thousand aspects of itself.

Appearance looked back to its hidden truth
And made of difference oneness’ smiling play;
It made all persons fractions of the Unique,
Yet all were being’s secret integers.

On a meeting line of hazardous extremes
The Game of games was played to its breaking point,
Where through self-finding by divine self-loss
There leaps out unity's supreme delight
Whose blissful undivided sweetness feels
A commonality of the Absolute.

Naturally, “this knowledge was now made a cosmos’ seed.” The Divine Purusha has done his job, of willing and forming the new creation. Its manifestation has to be done by the Divine Shakti. He must pray for her descent, for her incarnation; she must take the mortal birth.

RYD

Is there a word for meditation in the Mvskoke language?
Joy Harjo wonders in one of her old web logs if “there’s a word for meditation in the Mvskoke language. Maybe some things don’t need words. Maybe words can narrow rather than open up meaning and understanding. I don’t know that. What I call meditation is paying attention, listening and being grateful. This means remembering and utterly knowing there is no separation between the human spirit and that of the redbird-person spirit, or that of the winds who live in the Ko’olau’s, or your ancestors and yourself, the ocean, or any other manifestation of life as it happens as you are breathing and taking in the gifts of life. Most of all, perhaps, it’s stopping thinking. Thinking has become too prevalent in this culture. It has been given power over good old common sense, even… Thinking by itself, however is dangerous. Massacres and countries voting in leaders who promote war for greediness can happen only when thinking is predominant, when there is no link to the heart, to the intuition. We’ve been taught that thinking and acquiring intellectual knowledge is what it means to be civilized…”
http://www.joyharjo.com/news/2006/06/learning-to-be-or-mvskoke-meditiation.html

But whether there’s a word or not for meditation in our digital language, let us read Mary Olivers The Buddha’s Last Instruction in its modern nakedness:

“Make of yourself a light”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal--a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire--
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

http://www.allspirit.co.uk/maryoliver.html#last

The mornings come but we make ourselves not the light, and the Buddha returns not. In fact, why should he? Should he return, he will definitely have to make a trip to Kyoto. Instead, what we have now is “the inconvenient truth” of our sad making, and we keep our eyes shut to the pressing reality. We look into the faces of “frightened crowd”, not only of this age but of times to come in sorrowful movement. This is the result of clipped and grouchy human potential and if “something of inexplicable value” has to emerge we will have yet to know what the Buddha meant when he said “Make of yourself a light”.

Sarojini Naidu lived in another world where she would address to the Buddha seated on a lotus. The days were yet warmer and there was the colourful intimacy between men and things, with the “intuitivities of psychic feeling, sensation and life-vision or a subtle and psychic and spiritualised imagination and intelligence”.

Lord Buddha, on thy Lotus-throne,
With praying eyes and hands elate,
What mystic rapture dost thou own,
Immutable and ultimate?
What peace, unravished of our ken,
Annihilate from the world of men?

The wind of change for ever blows
Across the tumult of our way,
To-morrow’s unborn griefs depose
The sorrows of our yesterday.
Dream yields to dream, strife follows strife,
And Death unweaves the webs of Life.

For us the travail and the heat,
The broken secrets of our pride,
The strenuous lessons of defeat,
The flower deferred, the fruit denied;
But not the peace, supremely won,
Lord Buddha, of thy Lotus-throne.

With futile hands we seek to gain
Our inaccessible desire,
Diviner summits to attain,
With faith that sinks and feet that tire;
But nought shall conquer or control
The heavenward hunger of our soul.

The end, elusive and afar,
Still lures us with its beckoning flight,
And all our mortal moments are
A session of the Infinite.
How shall we reach the great, unknown
Nirvana of thy Lotus-throne?

http://www.bartleby.com/236/379.html

There is great inspiration behind 2nd and 3rd stanzas; they seem to come from a high overhead plane, yet lyrically psychic. The rest is, professionally perfect in which the Buddha’s rapture doesn’t become convincingly mystic. About Sarojini Naidu, Sri Aurobindo writes in a letter: “Her work has a real beauty, but it has for the most part only one highly lyrical note and a vein of riches that has been soon exhausted.” In the above two stanzas there is the valid psychic-spiritual atmosphere and it is these which will endure the passage of time.

But The Golden Age by the Irish poet George William Russell (A. E.) is more sustained, more reassuring:

When the morning breaks above us
And the wild sweet stars have fled,
By the faery hands that love us
Wakened you and I will tread

Where the lilacs on the lawn
Shine with all their silver dews,
In the stillness of a dawn
Wrapped in tender primrose hues.

We will hear the strange old song
That the earth croons in her breast,
Echoed by the feathered throng
Joyous from each leafy nest.

Earth, whose dreams are we and they,
With her heart’s deep gladness fills
All our human lips can say,
Or the dawn-fired singer trills.

She is rapt in dreams divine:
As her clouds of beauty pass,
On our glowing hearts they shine,
Mirrored there as in a glass.

So when all the vapours grey
From our flowery paths shall flit,
And the dawn begin the day,
We will sing that song to it.

Ere its yellow fervour flies.—
Oh, we are so glad of youth,
Whose first sweetness never dies
Nourished by eternal truth.

http://www.bartleby.com/253/94.html

The singer of the “eternal truth” is undoubtedly a profound mystic. With him one really enters “into the mystery of things” that comes out characteristically with a “delicate and fine beauty of the word of vision and of an intuitive entrance”.

Ethna Carbery’s The Four Places of Sorrow has a thicker kind of mysticism, charged well enough with the occult but not deepening into the sweet and the splendid:

There is sorrow for me in the North, where the black wind blows,
(Hush, O Wind of the dirges, O Voice of the restless dead!)
The ache of its cruel keening thro’ my heart like an arrow goes,
I see in the tossing waters the sheen of a dear bright head.

There is sorrow for me in the South, where the white wind sings,
(Hush, O wind of all lovers, crooning a laugh and a cry!)
On the pain of a dream love-haunted breaks the music of wings,
Seagulls, sweeping and swaying, saw ye my dead drift by?

There is sorrow for me in the East, where the red wind bums,
(Hush, O Wind of remorse, O Wind of the scourging flame!)
Under its slow cold dawning the soul of the drowned returns
And wan, in the startled daybreak, a ghost from the sea he came.

There is sorrow for me in the West, where the brown wind raves,
(Hush, O Wind from the bogs, O memory-freighted Wind!)
He is spindrift hither and thither, sport of unweary waves:
Would that my heart were close on his heart, my eyes on his eyes were blind!

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Ethna_Carbery_Poet_Poetry_Picture_Bio.htm

The last example we might take is that of Sigitas Geda’s God's Family:

Once in the universe ripened
God’s small family: a wife
and a small boy, who looked
at the great blue evening
with dark eyes,
and a husband – a brave musician,
a pleasant singer from the circus,
who loved to drink wine
the color of smoky grasses.

Once in the universe ripened
God’s small family:
on wayworn legs the boy
carries an ant on his
palm toward the elderberry bush
swaying in the night...
The dark-eyed woman, alas, didn't know
why it was all necessary
and knitted far into the night.

Once in the universe ripened
God’s small family,
and there is no one to tell now
what awaits them, what will
still be... Toward the dusty
elderberry falls the reddening
blossom of the stars,
and paled lips articulate
a single word: death...

Translated by Jonas Zdanys

http://www.efn.org/~valdas/geda.html

A single word: death—is that what the Buddha meant when he said make yourself a light? I think these compositions provide us a good occasion to check whether we can meditate on the issues of profound concern in the context of Aswapati’s downward look exploring in the manner of the sea the depths lying below it. If these poetic creations can be taken as an index of a promise of the best possible human potential, then the kind of utterance we have in Savitri seems to belong to something totally out of its reach. And yet we ought to get there, at the mantra. Sri Aurobindo has willed it and the divine Muse must arrive to accomplish it.

RYD